The Curragh of Kildare means a lot to many of us. To racing people, of course. To the soldiery - especially says a friend if, as a recruit, you had to wriggle across stretches of it on your belly, a rifle cradled in your arms and your nose never far from the remains of a sheep's last meal, to put it delicately.
But to anyone travelling westwards on that road, the Curragh means a sudden lifting of spirits as you come up onto the lovely, open green expanse - grass, green even in this dry season, the whin bushes, the air. That is one common perception. An article in Le Monde opens by telling us of leaden skies "Grass and more grass, inhabited by dirty sheep stained with blue ... neither fine trees nor trout streams." It is flat. But the grass is what matters, the writer goes on. It matters for the horses: the grass, the calcium in the water.
For her chief objective is Tully, the National Stud - and the famous Japanese garden which she tells us is the grandest of its kind in Europe. Founded by Colonel William Hall-Walker, formerly of the Indian Army, member of a rich brewing family, the stud farm had great successes including Minoru, winner of the Derby of 1909.
Then Hall-Walker went back to England, and handed over the stud to the Crown. It finally became the property of the Republic. But also the Colonel, later a Lord, had built up a splendid Japanese garden; some people will even go so far as to say second in the world only to that of the Emperor. He installed a Japanese master gardener Tassa Eida and his family in a two-storey house and hired forty men. They spent five years transforming what had been marshy ground into an elegant tea garden with little hills, a river, waterfalls, grottoes and enclosed walks. A ship was hired to bring in elements which no Japanese garden, writes Veronique Maurus, can be without: rare plants, of course, old statues, stone lamps, the bridge of red wood, the teahouse, centuries-old bonsai etc. The Garden according to this article should be an enigma, a picture puzzle to which the solution is "The journey of a soul. Each plant, each hump or hill, the least of the pebbles has been put there with care to evoke an episode in the life of a man." An atmospheric, inscrutable photograph gives something of this. Go see.